Hayles 2021
Hayles, N. Katherine. Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational. New York: Columbia UP, 2021.
Introduction
“It is time — indeed, past time — to create a vocabulary and conceptual framework acknowledging the the sea change that occurred when computational media permeated the printing industry … The term I propose to designate this new state of affairs is post print” (2)
“The period from 1950 to 2000 represents a difference in scale so dramatic that it amounts to a qualitative, not merely quantitative transformation. It is not exaggeration to say it constitutes a rupture in the genealogy of printed books — the rupture denoted by the term postprint.” (2)
“The codes underlying digital texts position print in a profoundly different way than it was positioned in previous epochs, for in the posprint era hard copy becomes merely one kind of output among many possible displays.” (3)
“Th e diff erence is emphatically not between the materiality of print and the immateriality of digital forms, as is sometimes proclaimed, but rather between diff erent kinds of material instantiations and diverse kinds of textual bodies.” (3)
“My approach has been to scale up (and down) to what I see as the catalyst for all of postprint’s diverse aspects— namely, the emergence of cognition in artificial media.” (6)
Defines cognition as “the process of interpreting information in contexts that connect it with meaning” (6) — all lifeforms exhibit some kind of cognition, as does computational media
“interpretations and meaning- making practices circulate through transindividual collectivities created by fl uctuating and dynamic interconnections between humans and computational media, interconnections that I call cognitive assemblages” (8)
“The cognitive-assemblage framework enables to different kinds of discourses: one that focuses on the materialities of individual participants and another that focuses on the more abstract flows that bind entities together into a collectivity” (12-3)
“What kind of work can the cognitive- assemblage framework do in relation to postprint? It provides a way to conceptualize innovations in print technology as redistributions of cognitive capabilities between humans and machines.” (15)